Performance of a fade-compensated 16 QAM with diversity reception in mobile radio channels

The paper studies the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of a fade-compensated 16 QAM with two-branch postdetection selection combining diversity reception in the Rayleigh fading channels. A pilot symbol-aided (PSA) technique that uses both pilot symbols and data symbols is employed for fading compensation. Computer simulation results have shown that, the use of diversity reception technique can significantly improve the BER performance when the normalized delay between the signals at the two receivers is small. It is also shown that, the error-floor is sensitive to the normalized delay, but relatively less sensitive to the power ratio between the signals at the two receivers